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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24405172">Apotheosis</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/god_queen/pseuds/god_queen'>god_queen</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Twin Verse [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Borderlands (Video Games)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Abstract, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Cults, F/M, Gore, Hallucinations, Mild Incest, Religious Imagery &amp; Symbolism, Unreliable Narrator, Violence, early cult days, godhood, monster au, slight AU, twins are a mess</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 07:01:36</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>15,353</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24405172</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/god_queen/pseuds/god_queen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Things have been going great for the twins, until its not anymore<br/>Consequences insure for heresy against the universe</p><p>Each chapter written in perspective of each twin<br/>Will format better later</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Troy Calypso/Tyreen Calypso</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Twin Verse [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1443439</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/DramaticDino/gifts">DramaticDino</a>, <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchemist17/gifts">alchemist17</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>The Word of God became man, that man may become god.<br/>~ Clement of Alexandria</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>To call it a Siren’s Song would have been just, if not ironic. More accurate would be to call it the bait of a line, one hooked not into flesh, but into the very desires of the mind.</p><p>The draw was stuck deep and true. Its victim, a smallish woman, all tanned skin and bleached hair, felt it like nothing before. There was a hint of water in the desert, of food in an empty stomach. A hint of pleasures promised to flesh and blood.</p><p>But this draw was far more. It was calling to every sense, whispering deep in her mind, flooding through her body in anticipation.</p><p>Taking it was autonomous. No need to tell her hands what to do. No thought to let it lure her in, to allow it inside of herself. No awareness that it, through her, was consuming itself.</p><p>Just a reflection in her eyes, watching the movie unfold. Watching pure light and color bleed out from pale skin and form, condensing as it trailed to her.</p><p>And there it was. Her Siren’s Song.</p><p>The moment was glorious. In the palm of her hands, cupped perfectly inside, a galaxy. A spiral, no less, so much like the one she occupied, yet the disc stretched out just a few hand-lengths.</p><p>The center was dense, bright, yet, the light inside stretched no further than itself. It thrummed with life, burning dark blues and reds on observation, only for the light to catch in its own dark aura with no escape.. Spinning lazy circles around the center was the disc itself, full of motes of color and light being suffocated by shrouds of darkness like oil.</p><p>The whole display looked like a galaxy. It was about the right proportions, it moved how she would expect one to, it pulsed with potential energy like she would expect from a sea of stars. As small as it was, as constrained as it was by hazy darkness, she still felt like it was a galaxy. This little replica, reflected in her eyes as a swirl of angry red, had every bit the same power as holding the galaxy in the palm of her hand.</p><p>Breathing in, letting her lungs expand, letting particles of power fill her chest and seep into her blood, her mind flooded with evocations of just that scenario. Towering over the cosmos, holding an eternity worth of life and power. Looking down through the cosmos with no more than morbid curiosity.</p><p>Her eyes had closed as her mind wandered. The reflection was gone, and soon the swirl of heat and dark was as well, crushing deep into her hand with fingers curled around it. All the while, she drank in heavy lungs full of air, letting the cycle of her own breath swirling power through her blood blind her to the world outside.</p><p>And then it was gone. The fingers of her outstretched hand relaxed, slightly, then began to unfurl. In the place the tiny phenomena had been was now glowing red skin, hot pink as if the tanned appendage had been held to a fire. Just past, crimson marks flared beneath her skin, burning to the surface, then out in pillars of light that stretched up her exposed wrist, her elbow, her arm and shoulder.</p><p>When the light had faded, blue patterns sat in its place. Elegant, ornate, beautiful. They had settled in just beneath the skin, wrapping a small, toned arm as the marks had been there this entire time.</p><p>Eyelids drifted open, exposing crystal-blue to the open air once more. The color had to settle, drawing its way down from the top of her lashes like snow straying down from the sky, following the path of her iris’ leveling in front of her.</p><p>“Someone looks pleased,” a voice rumbled in the direction of her gaze.</p><p>Her first tether of focus finally latched into place, and she blinked just to see the man in front of her. How she hadn’t noticed him there before was beyond her, he was hard not to notice, after all. He towered well above her, even slouched against the stone column as he was, metal arm dug in against the surface for comfort.</p><p>“Someone is pleased,” she answered. The pause before she could even answer didn’t go unnoticed, but more pressing to her was maintaining her own breathing, and the taste of the air that came with it.</p><p>“Looks like you took one hell of a hit.”</p><p>Her focus was still absent-minded, having just come back to life as it had, so she gave no indication that she had even heard his comment. Her more pressing issues were still pressing. The air felt different, in her nose, on her lips. Colors burnt across the edges of her eyes in a new way, crisp and vibrant.</p><p>Still, she could feel his attention. A magnifying glass under the sun would be less intense on its focal point than the way he ate with his eyes, back and forth and drifting up from the ground until they had finally reached her face.</p><p>“More than just one hell of a hit,” he added.</p><p>Her response was delayed. She busied herself instead with brushing the hair out of her face, replacing words with an attempt to ground herself back into being herself.</p><p>“She didn’t get a hit off,” she said. The truth, of course. The plan and execution had been perfect.</p><p>“I didn’t say a punch.” She could feel his smirk, but let it glance from her without retort. He spoke truth as well. The power she had just pulled into herself was still getting comfortable, and every moment it swirled in the back of her head was another she felt light. Not light-headed, but physically lighter, faster, stronger, more aware, keener of every little detail.</p><p>“Alright… maybe that shit is doing a number on me.”</p><p>When she looked at him again, he had drawn from his position against the pillar to stand in front of her. At any distance he was imposing. At this distance, enough for her to reach a hand out and touch the expanse of scarred skin exposed to her eyes, he eclipsed the world and hung over her as the night would hang over the sky.</p><p>His eyes, blue moons in the dark bearing down on her, softened. They burned still, in an intensity projected privately and only for her. Not searing flames, but warmth stripping away the facade of their subject to peer at what was lying beneath.</p><p>“You okay, Tyreen?” He asked. Rare enough to hear him speak her full name, rarer still was the soft, quiet voice hushed between them.</p><p>“Well, Troy,” Tyreen started, then forced her lips into a wide, empty grin. “I just got high sucking the super-powers out of a space witch, and I think I might have touched god for a second or two. Or became them…”</p><p>“Oh, well… Sounds like you’re just peachy then. A moment of confusion must have hit me to think you, you of all people, might need some concern over your well-being or anything.” He had barely let the short-lived sarcastic monologue out before he felt a sharp slap against his exposed side. The skin that touched him was the heat inside a burning fire pit, felt even in a split-second of contact.</p><p>“Jerk,” Tyreen mumbled.</p><p>“Bitch,” Troy replied.</p><p>They shared a sly smile between themselves. The air that had been so plaguing Tyreen began to dull. Power, energy, motes of essence condensed from a model galaxy, wafted steadily closer to their innate slumber. Tyreen could feel herself steadily righting. Settling into herself. Her own skin, her own senses.</p><p>“Not to seem concerned or anything,” Troy said. “But how are you feeling?”</p><p>Tyreen let out a puff of breath. Mentally, she tried to figure out just what the answer to that was. Tracing herself was hard, trying to figure out just what she was, how much encompassed her as an entity and how much of that had changed upon upgrading her metaphorical battery.</p><p>The scope of the changes were harder to define that just saying she felt stronger, or that she had more energy. Not when the very experience of breathing, seeing color, or standing were so different than they had been.</p><p>To think of just her current experiences left out another aspect. Perhaps the most important aspect. Briefly hinted in a joke about becoming God for a moment, now ricocheted back to her current thoughts, each moment, each sensation, as clear as the present to her.</p><p>“Bitch.” Tyreen caught herself, blinked a few times to focus herself, and turned her eyes back up to her brother. “You’re spacing again. I said, how it do?”</p><p>“Um…” She thought, squashed her lips together, puffed her cheeks, looked around for nothing. Then, she brought herself back, focusing on the face still regarding her attentively. “I don’t know? Good? Can’t really say like a new woman, cause I still have to put up with your ugly face.”</p><p>“Oof. Do I smell a barbeque, or is that just you roasting me?”</p><p>“Doesn’t smell like burnt shit to me.” The natural smile returned on her, growing steadily as they fed it humor and affection slathered in sarcasm. Mixed with the sense of feeling like herself once more, it reminded her of first closing her eyes after forcing herself to stay awake, or taking her shoes off after a long day. “For real? I feel… like… I don’t know. I got a job to do, to become a god. And I just got everything I need to do it. And I’m better, stronger, faster than I’ve ever been.</p><p>Troy was nodding affirmatively at her as she spoke, hand on his chin. A look of deep thought settled over him before he replied. “So… pretty good.”</p><p>“Yeah,” Tyreen said. “Yeah, dumbass. Pretty good. Pretty fucking good.”</p><p>“Good.” That said, he reached his good arm over, gripping a large palm over the top of her head, and started to shake it rapidly through the short, bleached hair. “Good! Sounds good!”</p><p>“Stop!” Tyreen squealed. “Bitch!” With all the rage of a small woman a foot and a half smaller than her attacker, she slammed one foot down onto his. Her hands managed to separate his one from her head, and she glared furiously upwards, icy blue back-lit by a spectral glow.</p><p>“You suck,” she said.</p><p>He didn’t have to say anything. Instead, teeth clamped together, head tilted up, eyes squeezed shut, he gave a wide grin.</p><p>“Do that again, and I’m going to test this shit on you. See if you’re still grinning when I’m kicking your ass with space witch mojo.”</p><p>There was a pause, a lengthy one, as Tyreen made sure she was immaculate once again. She had to smooth out the sleeveless jacket she wore. Smooth the shirt peeking out under it. Make sure all of her hair was pointing the same direction, flat and orderly. Check that the smooth side of her head was clear of any wandering strands.</p><p>“Now,” she said. “Like I was trying to say…”</p><p>“Not my fault you get side-tracked.”</p><p>“Trying to say,” she started once more. “That thing we keep saying? About becoming actual gods? I’m going to do it. And I know how…”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.<br/>~Robert A. Heinlein</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Power. Such a subjective word.</p><p>Power had many forms, many meanings. The word itself could be abstracted out into almost anything. A louder noise would be more powerful than a softer noise. Breathing would have more power for a free man than one in shackles. A word would have more power spoken from a man a man on a screen than one in a void.</p><p>Troy had power. Or, so he had thought.</p><p>He had strengthened his weakened body through years of work and technology. He had learned skills to give him an edge over others. He had gained unfathomable energy from mystic sources.</p><p>But he realized, now, that there was so much more to gain. His previous understanding of power as something abstract and undefinable was wrong.</p><p>There was a peak. All those different definitions were paths up the mountain, many leading to others, or to cliff faces, or plateauing or even going back down. Not all paths were created equal, but all led to the same summit.</p><p>Troy was the closest to the summit he had ever been. Those times before where Troy thought that he had power was the blind pomposity of a man who had accomplished little, thinking the struggle alone was equal to the reward, while refusing to look for the destination.</p><p>Tonight put it all in perspective. Tonight served as the medium, the lens to show how far he had come.</p><p>Tonight, Troy commanded the hearts of man.</p><p>He did so from his place on the mountain. It was a long, half-circle platform, raised high off the ground. Flames framed it, framed him, bathing a hellish red glow over his features, turning the smoke around him into a crimson fog.</p><p>Those pillaring flames heeded, coiling to the ground and flowing from the platform’s lip around his feet like running water. They cowered for him as he stepped up to the edge. As he looked over his kingdom. As he commanded.</p><p>A sea stretched through the night before him. An ocean of bodies. Of faces wild and chaotic. All jumping. Writhing. Screaming. Drawing the darkness into a unified rumble of sound.</p><p>With a sweep of his arm this sea rose, arms stretched into the sky. Light from his fires caught thousands of weapons, masks, and more, shimmering back up at him, dancing in the night at his command.</p><p>This was true power. Complete control. His own, individual will stretched out, and in a ripple of change reflected back by thousands of separate faces. He pulled them into a frenze, raised their voices to deafen the sky. And all this from just a little effort.</p><p>The crowd rose to the point where he could hear nothing else. His own movements never reached his ears. Only the shudder of the floor beneath kept him informed at their movement. Thousands jumping up and down to shake the stone below, felt through his feet to his spine. Their energy was intoxicating, every action of his own that reached back to him making his blood pump into a frenzy.</p><p>Looking over the chaos, he knew it was time. Time to raise his mechanical arm, lifting to the sky. Then to wait. Ten, fifteen, thirty… To slam his fist into the ground, shockwave echoing back.</p><p>Chaos. Louder, louder than ever before. Louder than perceived possible.</p><p>Behind Troy, a wall had fallen at the impact. Near-transparent, it had given just a silhouetted tease of who had risen to stand above.</p><p>With the wall’s collapse, there stood Tyreen, arms stretched to the sky, screaming something into her microphone. All lights were on her, all eyes turned her way.</p><p>The crowd loved it. They had to. Troy had planned it meticulously, counting and rehearsing and shoving the exact steps and angles through Tyreen’s ears until her eyes were spinning. He had captured the exact second each of the pyrotechnics would trigger, when the lift would raise, how long it would take his sister to reach her spot just above and behind where he stood.</p><p>Each reaction commanded from this sea of psychopaths before them was no question nor surprise. It was another step in a path that had been started years before. It was the reaction of an audience, each with their hearts and minds enamored, before a concert in which the brilliant conductor had expertly brought each instrument to life before revealing the virtuoso of which he had taught to steal their hearts.</p><p>And of course, this step, this first live event of Troy and Tyreen to their adoring, reverent followers, was a simple stepping stone in the long run. Now that he was here, witnessing how easy it was to command an army, there would be no stopping them until the world was at their feet.</p><p>Which was why everything needed to be perfect. Why he had set up every minute detail to be perfect.</p><p>Why rage boiled through him when an unexpected visitor launched from the crowd to land upon his lower platform. Rage blotted out reason for a breath, obscuring any logical question about who this person was and how they could jump the nearly twenty feet up to him.</p><p>Grinding his teeth helped, so did the long exhale and each forced thought of calm and planning that followed. He let it all flow through, the sounds bearing down on him, the feelings of an insignificant ant threatening his careful plot, each sensation. Then, Troy smiled.</p><p>There was no surprise here, just a lesson learned. More security next time.</p><p>The figure landed across from him was slight, hidden entirely in black and red garb. An old logo was torn from their tunic, which itself was a sleek material that had been specially produced and then worn rough over time. Two blades extended from the would-be assassin’s wrists, resting against the floor, then raising as the lifted their body and faced him.</p><p>Troy was still deafened by the noise. His mouth opened, air came out. Speakers all around him boomed to life, accented by lights and sparks shooting from beneath. Troy couldn’t hear what he, himself, had said.</p><p>Just that the crowd loved it.</p><p>And then the assassin was on him, turned to a sharp flash of color like a blade striking out. It arced straight to him, only to stop dead in its tracks.</p><p>A length of metal stretched out, Troy’s arm. It crossed the distance between both figures, bridging the stretched grin and wide, unflinching eyes of the twin and the helmet of the figure clutched by the neck in his grasp.</p><p>The blades of the assassin could have reached something, Troy knew. His arm wasn’t immune to damage, neither was the flesh of his side. But a glance down showed a different picture, each length of metal suspended by a warping shadow of darkness.</p><p>His sister should have had the assassin for a meal as a prize. No doubt she was looking very smug above him.</p><p>But this wasn’t Tyreen’s party. Hers was the kind of event held deeper in the night in hushed quarters.</p><p>This was Troy’s time. And he thought in terms of the summit they had to reach, each word and action building into their path to godhood.</p><p>Extra work went into lifting the assassin. Not because they were particularly heavy, just to erase any hint of effort from his face. To smirk instead, crazed mask replaced with the smugness of victory.</p><p>More words were shouted, echoed ever louder by the speakers. Something about an example, about fun and triumph.</p><p>Troy followed a script he was writing at the same moment. There was humor. There was satisfaction. And at the end was a gift for their loving audience.</p><p>An assassin, thrown back into the crowd the same way they had jumped out. Disappeared into a writhing mass of shadowed bodies and glinting weapons, of murderous, hollowed blue eyes.</p><p>Maybe the guest had thrown a little wrench into their operation. But Troy couldn’t have planned that out better if he had tried. The crowd loved it. The crowd loved the twins.</p><p>But, they definitely needed ear plugs, Troy reflected later. He was sitting on a crate of sound equipment that a loyal few had packed for them, slumped on the weight of his metal arm, musing on the ringing in his ears that had yet to stop.</p><p>Tyreen glided out of the darkness not long after. Her skin was still slicked with sweat, outfit still carefully glued and taped in place, but hair now ruffled down over her face. One hand settled on her hip, the other held a cask of water loose beneath her.</p><p>“That was… epic,” she said. Her breath had yet to catch up to her, as followed directly after was another deep intake and a swig of water.</p><p>Troy looked out. He had been casually observing the mud beneath, now he was staring out at his sister who was only just head level while he was sitting on a box and slumping over. At first he blinked at her. A smile started to stretch out next, before ending in a wide grin.</p><p>“Shut up,” Tyreen said. She huffed and rolled her eyes. But the silence didn’t let up, not with her head turned, or one of the massive flood lights graced by her attention. Quiet seeped out beneath them, edging slowly under her skin.</p><p>“Fine! Say it.”</p><p>“I told you so,” Troy sung, or more accurately, badly warbled at her. He reached out, playfully jabbing his fingers out at her, barely touching with his mechanical arm before having it swatted down. Even the little impact flared sore skin across his shoulder and dropped the appendage into the dirt.</p><p>“Ow.”</p><p>“Oh, you big baby. I barely touched you.” She moved and was on his lap, feet dangling in the air over the ground. Her head nestled into the crook of his good shoulder. Tiredness seeped from one into the other, and back. Muscles, sore from hours spent standing and performing, sagged until there was no separation from one twin into the other.</p><p>“I told you,” Troy spoke quietly between them, “That a live show would be the most amazing thing you’d ever seen. Biggest, most spectacular thing ever. And I was right.”</p><p>“Somehow,” Tyreen agreed.</p><p>“We made an army, that’s how.” He rested his chin down on her head, and together they both looked out across the silhouettes of a mountainous horizon.</p><p>“And? What next, oh glorious producer?”</p><p>“Next… Next we make a religion. And then, we get a bigger stadium.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>There are two kinds of monsters, the kind that hunted the streets and the kind that lived in your head.<br/>~Victoria Schwab</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>With a creak, the water stopped. The last of it flowed down the drain, leaving the drab metal bare.</p><p>Above, a mirror reflected. Plain gray walls. A small shower, slick from recent use. Towels stacked on a rack, too colorful for their surroundings. In the center, a short woman, with tanned skin, hair frosted at the ends, and a scar marring a button nose between two clear blue eyes.</p><p>The woman in the mirror looked different than Tyreen remembered. The face was the same shape, as if tracing an existing picture to copy it. The eyes weren’t right, sunken and resting on dark bags. The hair was messier, even wet and combed to its usual side. The perfect cut of the locks had grown out, ragged. That scar was new as well, a chip off her nose that had been unblemished just years before.</p><p>The cost of spending almost every waking hour on a road of conquest was often rest and recovery. Or, maybe this was the cost of getting older. Or that she had just taken her makeup off for once, revealing a character she had not seen in ages.</p><p>Tyreen wasn’t quite sure. She just knew that the woman standing naked in the mirror had changed, if only a little.</p><p>The shower had stopped dripping, as had the sink. Stepping back, Tyreen stifled a wide yawn with her hand and began to pad sluggishly from the small room. The light flicked off behind her and she left a chamber of void.</p><p>On the other side of a hissing door, she found herself in her quarters. No lights were on, darkness angled in from the other side of the room. What military efficiency the bathroom displayed had been coated over here, rugs carpeting the floor, banners hanging from the walls. The bed in the center had been redone, with airy curtains tinting the view inside it.</p><p>Across, a large window made up the main wall. One fist-sized spider web marked slightly off its center. Cracks spread out from there, skewed lines across the world outside.</p><p>They were high up. All the way at the peak of an old Dahl cruiser, resting in its final berth. But at night, none of that was visible. Just a distant horizon, the hint of canyons running the length to the far off sky, and a starscape above.</p><p>The main thing that Tyreen liked about this place so far was the quiet. Granted, the cruiser was far from the worst temporary base they had come to. There was running water, heat at night, shade in the day, and electricity to run all their devices. But, no other place they had rested at held so little to see or worry about. Just a still horizon, nothing stirring or making so much as a peep but stars creeping across the sky.</p><p>The perfect way to fall asleep, Tyreen thought. Her toes sank into deep carpet, carrying her across the floor. There, she pushed through silky curtains and onto the soft bed.</p><p>With the ambient light filtering through the window, she could see Troy there clearly. The soft highlights on the curves of his face and body were akin to seeing the moon illuminate the canyon walls from their dark crevices outside. Hung over his chest was an arm, across was an empty metallic port, bordered by rough skin.</p><p>A gentle rise and fall to his chest told Tyreen he was already asleep. She could see a hint of parted lips and closed eyes against the darkness.</p><p>Weariness pulled her limbs down into the comforting softness. Troy barely stirred, except to lift his arm for her to slip underneath. She settled in there, face resting against the warm skin of his chest, and let another yawn slip out as she waited for sleep to claim her.</p><p>Comfort cradled her there, protected beneath the blankets, warm from the heat radiating at her side. The touch of her skin against his was more a home than any bed. A smell of cleanliness surrounded them, soap and shampoo from recent showers. Beneath was a hint of another home, a smell so much her brother she knew it better than her own body.</p><p>Sleep caught her in a loose hold. Surrounded by comfort, Tyreen let herself be pulled down, consciousness stripped from reality into the depths of a shadowed bed. Into a pure darkness.</p><p>As quiet as sleep had taken her, it returned to lift her back out of the dark and into herself. She brought back no memories of dreams, no memories of sleep at all. Just a sluggish frustration.</p><p>The curtains above greeted her as she opened her eyes. They told of the passage of time, the pale reflection of moonlight painting new patterns from where she had last seen it. An absolute stillness accompanied the faint light, no wind or air to brush aside the silk or disturb the chill.</p><p>The room was serene. Peaceful. Though she felt all of her senses as awake as herself, she let the calm lure her eyelids back down. Gentle breathing beside her eased her back into sleep.</p><p>Then she was seeing again. Her eyes hung open, gaze focused somewhere on the darkness of the ceiling above her bed.</p><p>Once more, it felt as if she had not slept at all. No weariness or exhaustion pulled at her eyelids. No memory of sleep or dreams. All her senses alert and sharp. Even the faint light from outside held no clear tell if time had passed.</p><p>There was something. A vague pressure on her head. Not quite a headache, more a feeling. A feeling that concerned her, and she had no immediate guess as to why.</p><p>And then the pressure replaced by a dawning realization. Deafening silence surrounded her, more still than the air, than the silk around her. More still than the light of the moon.</p><p>Tyreen let her head roll to the side. No Troy. No brother. No warm body gently breathing next to her, one arm propping her head. Just pillows and an empty divot in the bed, roughly centered where Troy’s hips had been.</p><p>How he had slipped away with her in such a light sleep was a mystery. Troy was not the smallest of people, nor the most graceful. But, it wouldn’t be the first time he had pulled himself out of bed to use the bathroom, or grab a drink.</p><p>Mystery apparently solved, Tyreen returned her head to a more comfortable position against her pillows. With everything right once more, she settled in to let sleep take her, eyes shut once more.</p><p>And she waited. And waited… And waited…</p><p>A frustrated huff ceased her attempts to sleep. Minutes had passed, likely many minutes, and she was still just as awake. And Troy was still gone.</p><p>That amount of time was too much for a bathroom visit, or to reach the canteen. No, he was probably out causing more trouble. And the thought of that trouble of his was keeping her awake.</p><p>It was too easy to get out of bed. Instead of tiredness holding her to the softness and comfort, insomnia gave her an excess of energy to push herself up and pass through the curtains.</p><p>She paused, briefly, to grab her robe from beside the nightstand. One look at the bathroom door while she dressed told her that Troy wasn’t inside. The metal frame slumbered in the wall, no light peeking through the gap below.</p><p>So she circled the bathroom instead, stomping to the bulkhead door. No furnishing had been suitable to cover the wear across the exit, thick, scarred metal purposed for the military waiting cold for her touch. It sputtered before it opened, sliding out of the way to a hall as dimly lit and confined as behind her. More so, the windows here were spaced far apart, thin lattice running the edge of the hall at head height, just enough for a beam of moonlight to reach in.</p><p>This path of textured metal ran across the bow of the ship. It was the silence that Tyreen preferred, separated from the gutted midsection repurposed into a town of loyal followers. Officers quarters lay just out of sight, hidden behind similar utilitarian doors.</p><p>This was a darkness, a silence, she had asked for. Something away from the constant hustle and bustle of their daily lives.</p><p>Now it was an annoyance. The aggravation of having to wander through metal halls to find her poor, lost brother in nothing but plush robes and fuzzy slippers. While she wanted nothing more than to capture elusive sleep, no less.</p><p>So she stomped away, feeling the anger fester in her. Through the dark, under pale moonbeams, away from the bow towards the aft.</p><p>As she walked, her emotions were colored by an errant thoughtfulness. No longer just anger, but something akin to confusion.</p><p>This had been home for a while. She knew the way to her destination as if it were ingrained in her mind. Yet, she couldn’t recall the features of that destination.</p><p>Couldn’t recall them at all until she was there. Only a few strips of lighting were on in the mess hall, doing little more than framing rows of tables set up like headstones in a cemetery. A long bar stood off to one side, dark and still.</p><p>No one. Not a single soul.</p><p>Blue eyes cast from one side of the mess hall to the other. They found no surprise. A vague melancholy, perhaps, like memories of those no longer with her. But no names or faces to the memories. She had mellowed, mind replaying distant laughs as the figures in her subconscious traded jokes around a table.</p><p>Right, there was no one here. They were all gone. Long gone. Foolish of her to expect anything different.</p><p>She turned back to the hallway, arms clutched tight around herself, pulling the robes closer against the chill. Shuffling forward, she stood before the strip of glass. There was such a beautiful night on the other side. A lovely swirl of color atop distant mountains.</p><p>And, something else…</p><p>Something off.</p><p>Her eyes focused, horizon fading from view. Between herself and it was a reflection, a faint likeness of herself, standing, hand stretching out to the glass.</p><p>A likeness not her own. A woman looking back at her, a woman who was clearly different. Hair that she couldn’t recognize, a face too round and soft. Eyes, so striking they startled her.</p><p>Something else was there. She only just noticed it, something blurred in the corner of her eye. At first she thought it only a reflection, but when she turned it melted back, down the hall. Something had moved, something standing in the dark. Hidden, right in her field of view.</p><p>The cold gripped her. There was no other way to put it, first there had just been a chill, and then it settled deep through her skin to her bones.</p><p>The thoughts and feelings that had plagued her before were gone. Anger and melancholy stripped free. No task, no memories. No thought to breathe.</p><p>Just a dark hallway. Growing darker. Light warping. Folding. Closing in from the distance.</p><p>And then the darkness was just out of reach. At the end of the light from her window it waited, consuming the world beyond a ring of metal. Waiting to consume her.</p><p>Fear. She had never known this fear, but she could find no other name for it.</p><p>So deep and encompassing was this fear that she could feel nothing else. Her legs felt bolted to the ground, limbs weak and shaking, mouth dry and quivering.</p><p>It, whatever swirled in that darkness, was just out of reach. Waiting. Ready.</p><p>Yet somehow she knew if she were to turn and run it would catch her. Would rip her to shreds.<br/>
But it was making a big mistake. She wasn’t just anyone that could be scared into a corner. She wasn’t just anyone who would run from a fight. Or roll over and die.</p><p>She was a god. She was a Siren.</p><p>Telling herself just that, she willed her breath to come. Willed courage and anger to follow. Each short pant brought herself closer to a focus that had poured from her as soon as she had felt this presence.</p><p>And when that focus came to a head, fire. Flames roared from her fingers up her arms, answering her summons, burning light through the darkness surrounding her.</p><p>Her flames licked their way up to her elbows, weak at first. Then, she reached into herself, calling more of her power, turning each tip of fire into a force of her will that ripped violently across her skin.</p><p>No one stood against a god. Whatever had come to challenge her was going to have hell to pay.</p><p>She thought.</p><p>And yet her eyes were frozen open. The darkness swirled more violent, physical strands of ink swirling around the figure like a hurricane. Angry red was flaring in the midst, surrounding the small figure on the other side. Black, framed in red, with hollow eyes glowing crimson inside.</p><p>The feeling was new. Feeling her very essence slipping away. Her fire was the first thing to go, put out as quickly as a match. Then the power that she had used to summon it, scarlett motes separating from her, then coating in darkness.</p><p>Then came what was inside. It pulled to the surface, gripped by ice, seizing up the muscles and skin it passed as it was called away.</p><p>She was a god…</p><p>Yet she was left, blinking tears, as the strength was torn from her body. She was left, collapsing to her knees, welcoming death.</p><p>Every bit of her focus was on the feeling of her power draining away. The weakness left inside her. The deafening thrum echoing through her head, blotting every other sound out.</p><p>The hand shaking her, shaking all of it away. Leaving her blinking up at the concerned face of her brother before her.</p><p>A dream? No, a nightmare. The thought was comforting, yet chilling in its own way.</p><p>Everything had been so clear. As clear as Troy standing before her.</p><p>Standing. He was standing, eyebrows furrowed, leaning over her. All he had on were some loose sweatpants, one arm gripping Tyreen’s shoulder, the other empty air.</p><p>“Are. You. Okay?” Troy was asking.</p><p>But Tyreen was too busy looking around. She was just past the mess hall. It opened out to the hall that ran all the way up to their quarters, but the strip of window in front of it only went so far. All the way up until the hall sectioned off from the junction, to a strip of metal that circled the corridor.</p><p>To the exact spot Tyreen was standing. The exact spot that monster had been standing as it had drained the life from the nightmare version of her.</p><p>“I’m fine,” Tyreen answered. She blinked up at concerned eyes that told her very clearly that Troy did not believe her. “What happened?”</p><p>“I went to take a piss and when I got back, you had wandered all the way out here and you were trying to Siren-eat the floor.”</p><p>“You weren’t in the bathroom…” Tyreen said.</p><p>“I left the door open.”</p><p>“I couldn’t sleep. I waited for you to come back-”</p><p>“I was gone like two minutes. You were sleepwalking.”</p><p>But, was she? She was here, in the same fluffy robe and fuzzy slippers. In the same place. Next to the same empty mess hall, with the same horizon beside her. With all that the same, she was left with a shivering terror that being consumed by something like herself was the same as well. That, even as a god, something could come along and pull the very fabric of her power out like it was unravelling a loose thread.</p><p>“Come on,” Troy said, wrapping his good arm around his unnaturally-quiet sister. “Let’s get you back to bed. Whatever monster you’re chasing in your nightmare can wait for tomorrow.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>And I’ve broken/every code of practice/but for my love/I’d shift the planet’s axis<br/>~ Clockwork Quartet</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>A rasp. Slow, grating. Then a hiss of air escaping a machine. Another rasp.</p><p>Each was a labored breath from a withered face. He was long and crooked, towering over the metal slab of a chair he had been placed in. Each limb, all three of them, were gangly and weak, laying limp beneath him. His body, too, was limp where it sat, tilted up just enough to peer down with a hawkish squint.</p><p>His eyes were the only things that were moving. That, and the towering contraption piercing into the back of his neck that loomed above, pumping in and out with each breath through a clear mask.</p><p>There was movement before him, movement carefully followed by the pale blue of his eyes. His prey, or predator, stalked slowly from side to side.</p><p>She was pacing the small length of the room. At one time it had been some form of medical facility, or a poor representation of one. The walls had been painted with blood between then and now, the blood had dried, peeled, and a fresh coat had gone on. What medical supplies had been laid out across the counters in the past were replaced by cobbled tools of rusted metal built for a single, fatal purpose.</p><p>And there she was, walking back and forth between the rusted and bloodied counters, eyes open and unseeing. Pointed inwards. On her face, a distance far greater than the length of this room.</p><p>When she passed him, that distant look wasn’t the first noticeable thing. More noticeable was the rasp she had, so similar to her brother’s, as air was forced from her mouth. And the thick bandage strapped across her nose, once a pure white, stained a deep red that had slowly stained from the inside.</p><p>“You-”</p><p>“I’m thinking!” She cut him off before another word could escape. Their gazes locked, his a hardened glare, hers wide and lost.</p><p>“You know what to do,” he continued. His words were as slow as the machine pumping away behind him, but equally as strong as they were calm.</p><p>Nothing assuaged the panic in her. As soon as he had finished talking she was off again, pacing, but unable to escape the present now. The closest she could get to escape was fiddling with her hands, shaking and tapping them against each other.</p><p>“I wasn’t strong enough to protect you,” he said. As he spoke, she slowed. “We’ve both got the scars to show for that now.”</p><p>The gentle touch of her own hand reminded her of the bandage stitched to her face. Not that a reminder was needed of something she could feel every moment.</p><p>And Troy, her brother, had a scar so much worse than she could ever imagine. Not marred flesh, or broken bones. Metal, twisted and cracked. Wires, woven deep into his spine, exposed and frayed. A body, an entire seven feet of bone and muscle, rendered useless.</p><p>“We’re not made to be helpless,” he said, and paused to rasp in a deeper lungful of air.</p><p>“You could die,” Tyreen replied. “I haven’t tested it. You could pop like a fucking grape! Or… or liquify into purple ooze or some shit!”</p><p>“But I won’t.”</p><p>Panic flared too deep, touching anger. Anger that curled her lips up, turned her to face her brother. Only for that unwavering natural glare to hold her back.</p><p>Troy was everything in public. An entertainer. A celebrity. A comedian. A dramatic actor. He had a mouth that could talk forever and a face that could show anything he wanted.</p><p>There was no acting that could equal the true Troy. The strongest, most terrifying man Tyreen had ever known. A devil, wearing a human face, only showing his true psychopathic will when he let his mask rest.</p><p>The mask was resting now. His head was tilted down, eyes up bordering his eyebrows, themselves furrowed. No hesitation, faltering, or anything of the like. Quite the opposite.</p><p>Anger. Closely guarded rage. Something more…</p><p>A hunger. An obsession.</p><p>“We were made to be gods,” he said. Even for Tyreen, his twin, his love, a chill ran down her spine at how cold the words were to the fire raging behind his eyes. “Rulers. Immortal. But I can’t be. I can’t take my place at your side if I’m just a goddamn cripple.”</p><p>Now there was a wavering. More of a quaking as words escaped clenched teeth and hot rage twisted through his face.</p><p>For being powerful. For being a god, as Troy said, and not someone who was helpless, Tyreen certainly felt helpless.</p><p>She could feel herself trapped in a void. Two paths stretched out before her, each one obscured by a fog of uncertainty. Each step she took towards one would only send her recoiling back of her own power, so deeply afraid was she at just the thought of what waited at the end.</p><p>And here was her brother. Her strategist, her compass. Pointing her sternly down the path that she knew for certain ended in tragedy. But a tragedy she could not voice, or picture, just feel edging closer.</p><p>Tyreen was still there, trapped beneath her brother’s gaze, when the door behind her rocked as a heavy fist banged against it. The sound echoed violent through the room, but did nothing to disturb the man in the chair.</p><p>“My Lady,” the voice of the fist behind the door spoke, voice echoing both somber and panicked. Fearing death, regretting failure.</p><p>Tyreen already knew, of course. Troy had a sixth sense of many things, almost a precognition, and he had warned her this very event would come. And now, here he was, challenging her to turn away.</p><p>“Yes?” She called, still watching Troy.</p><p>“The assassins have breached the inner sanctum,” the man behind the door replied. “I’m afraid that by now, everyone is already-” Then, a single grunt of effort, and silence.</p><p>Quiet. Silence, droning in from every side but forward. There, the slow rasp-hiss and nothing else. What quiet had held the room before had been tainted a foul color, no longer innocent, but stained as much with the blood of the dead as the room itself was. Stained by the thought that dozens of loyal followers had just been gutted and left to rot. A path of death that would lead right from the gates, through the corridors and quarters, right to this spot.</p><p>Right to the rasp-hiss, each consequent noise another push down that path. All the while, that path was whispering its own promise of death, right back to her.</p><p>“Will we be gods? Or will we be helpless?”</p><p>Troy tasted victory, bitter and scathing. He watched as Tyreen shattered, expression caving into a quivering lip and eyes watered with tears. One hand held her bleached locks, itself echoing helplessness.</p><p>Troy had tasted victory. He could remember it, even now.</p><p>The victory. The feeling of his skin boiling from the inside. The searing pain of his arm branding itself. The raw, untapped power flowing, bursting through his blood.</p><p>He could remember only vaguely tearing apart an assassin against the door. Another just outside. Could remember red, a deep scarlett tinting the world. Blood, hot, fragrant, spilling over his fingers as life escaped another.</p><p>What Troy could not truly remember was who he was before. Yes, he had memories. He remembered his life, especially his time with Tyreen.</p><p>But he had seen a comment on one of his videos just recently that said he had changed. The memory of that had triggered one possible culprit of that supposed change, which had led to a moment of daydreaming, staring down at the twisting patterns of red that laced across his arm.</p><p>Not a tattoo, not quite a scar. Even today, it looked as fresh as the day it had burned out from under his skin. Reminded him of the power that he had taken, the risk that both twins had made to raise Troy up to stand at his sister’s side.</p><p>But memories were fleeting and the present was constant. Tyreen’s voice was much stronger in this present. There was still an underlying flavor of that young woman in tears at the thought of turning her brother into a monster, or worse, a popped grape.</p><p>The difference was in the intonation, louder and clearer. Less hissed s’s, popped p’s and the like. More strength and confidence. More pronounced beauty.</p><p>The voice that had drawn him out of his own abyss was standing at the front of a stage. Exertion beaded sweat across her forehead and lifted her chest higher with every shout, every twirl.</p><p>Tyreen was somewhat literally being put on a pedestal in front of them. Not only was she raised high, where the grasping hands closest the stage could only hope to brush the thick soles of her boots. She was also wearing the outfit that had become signature in front of their followers. Resting loose on her shoulders was an old military coat, the collar stretched out to frame her face, as if to raise her head above them before a glowing halo.</p><p>Shouting and waving her arms as she was, Tyreen was relaxed upon the stage. She was at home beneath the spotlight and among the strips of reds and purples and blues.</p><p>Together, the twins had stood before tens of thousands at once. They had packed arenas, filled valleys, and circled mountains with their crowds.</p><p>In comparison, this present Troy had found himself in was lax. Their stage rose from the ground to just over the heads below them. It was up against a natural stone wall, hidden inside a chamber of stone where the roof sloped naturally from above them towards the distant wall.</p><p>In total, probably a few hundred, at max, were crammed within the natural cave. Each face was turned up towards their Queen, hands stretched out to graze just a fragment of her aura.</p><p>There may have been nothing unique about the blind worship in each face he saw, but Troy was more than happy with this turnout. This was unique, not for the size of the crowd or adoration, but for the preparation.</p><p>For every two faces of adoration, there was one whose eyes were behind a plaster-white skull, crudely shaped to the exact likeness etched into Tyreen’s knee guard. One in five bore carved symbols on their outstretched arms, bright blues and reds to match their favored twin.</p><p>Troy could count at least a dozen different symbols to show their allegiance. Each one had been painstakingly prepared, from the moment he had put pen to paper in its design to the moment he had sent his spies out to suggest the holy objects.</p><p>Each symbol was a testament to their absolute fealty. Troy would know, given how carefully he had engineered the message each one held.</p><p>“This might just be the best crowd I’ve ever seen,” Tyreen was saying. She had so masterfully kept their faces turned to her, blind praise just another part of her act, giving Troy his time to stand to one side and think. More accurately, to plan.</p><p>Except in this case where Troy had spent the better portion of Tyreen massaging the crowd dredging up old memories and staring blankly. But, if there was one thing that time had massively inflated in Troy, it was his height.A second thing would be his ego. And his ego didn’t need a plan, it just needed a cue.</p><p>“I think- I think you might be right,” Troy said. He could feel the vibration of his voice echoing from hidden speakers around the room. That, and the sudden weight of a hundred faces turning his direction. “This does seem like the best crowd I’ve seen. We’ve seen. There’s nothing I find more… fulfilling, then seeing so many people who believe in our message. Who understand.”</p><p>“Preach, bro.”</p><p>“But, it also makes me kind of sad…” As he trailed off, he looked across the stage to his sister, sending with his look a sealed message for her eyes only. He could see the tease of a smirk quirk at her lips just after.</p><p>“Troy,” she said, voice layered with mock concern, “Why would you be sad?”</p><p>Pause. Breathe. Let the crowd hold a collective breath in anticipation. Troy even layered on a look of emotion, an emotion that would mean whatever it's viewer wanted to see, so vague and shallow was it.</p><p>“Well, all of you came here to see us. Not just us, of course. You came because you believe, you really believe in a better world. Just like we do. And yet, the people living in the town right above us at this very moment are just throwing everything you’re working for away.”</p><p>Hook, line, and sinker. Troy dropped a metaphorical match and watched as the flame of hate spread across every eye turned their way. He watched the peaceful group below them, hands outstretched in awe, collectively shiver and roil in anger.</p><p>There was a little rumble to his subjects. A dissonance that rose to just audible as Troy lumbered his way to the front of the stage, to squat down.</p><p>Now, to fan the flames.</p><p>What emotion had been on his face before had hardened. He was closer now, just close enough for the probing fingers to brush the dirt from his boots. Close enough to mirror the fresh anger the crowd was just beginning to taste.</p><p>“Honestly, I think it’s criminal what they’re doing up there. While you’re down here making the world- making the entire galaxy!- a better place, they’re selling all of your hard work.” He rose, stalked, slowly, to one side. Each step he found a new face to look into, another pawn to push forward. “Don’t get me wrong, I just want what you all want. Right, Tyreen?”</p><p>“Yeah,” Tyreen shot back. “At least, I would hope you all want a better life.”</p><p>“It’s just such a shame that they’re standing in your way,” Troy continued.</p><p>Now, according to Troy’s natural confidence leading him along, was where he would let the silence gestate. Let their loyal minions ‘think for themselves’, until each had reached the same conclusion. Except, the silence was broken by a shout across the crowd.</p><p>“Burn them!”</p><p>If Troy smoked, this was what he imagined a cigarette would taste like. Toxic, yet soothing, filling. The perfect little hit. With perfect timing, the perfect sentiment, the perfect tinder for what would become a beautiful fire.</p><p>Just after the first cry had started, it echoed through the chamber. If not a cry for fire, a more imaginative end to a human life was shouted forth. The peaceful reverence that Troy had seen on his walk to the front of the stage had twisted under the pressure of the mindless mob rage. Had snapped in just seconds.</p><p>“Hey, hey!” Tyreen shouted. The echo of her voice from the speakers quieted the rising den before them. “We don’t just burn people for no reason.”</p><p>“We just want a better world,” Troy continued. He had let Tyreen serve, her voice lacking any barb against the violence. A setup, passing the ball to Troy, his conversation to send where he saw fit. But the time to control the conversation had passed. Now was the time to pull the trigger.</p><p>“A better world that they,” he pointedly jabbed a finger to the gap of natural stone, towards the night beyond, “don’t want you to have… Tyreen isn’t telling you to burn them, or to get rid of them. What we are saying- do you want those kinds of people in your better world?”</p><p>No one knew better than Tyreen how much of a craftsmen Troy was when he had the stage. The goals were theirs, together. Their will had seen them to this place, this village at the edge of nowhere, built obviously atop the most valuable ruin in the world. Together they had decided to rid themselves of the eyesore before moving to claim the gem beneath.</p><p>But inciting murder was Troy’s piece de resistance. All she had to do was stand back. Watch. Admire.</p><p>Even without words he was impressive. Troy was crouched down once more, as level with the crowd as the giant of a man could ever be. One hand was sweeping out, pointing out each face before him. Every few seconds his gaze would flick to another face, enrapturing them before moving onto the next victim. Such a simple technique, codified for big speeches, hijacked now to feed the gullible with the madness in Troy’s eyes.</p><p>“- and you’ve got to ask yourself… Will you let them get away with that?” Troy was shouting.</p><p>Something was new though. Tyreen hadn’t noticed it at first because it was such a gradual change.</p><p>For these little events where the goal was repurposing the crowd, there was a certain formula. Twin A acts as a foil, calling to the better part of the crowd’s judgment while setting up the conversation for a retort by Twin B, who preaches to the darker half of the psyche. The angel and devil on everyone’s shoulder, conspiring with the intent to see the world burn.</p><p>Which led Tyreen to question why she was on one side of the stage, watching her brother. Why he was practically spitting his words, seering them forcefully into each ear. Why that madness he was feeding them seemed less a glass of concentrated wickedness served sparingly and more a spigot tapping a deep reservoir of insanity he was keeping private in his head.</p><p>“They thought we were mad,” Troy said. There was no longer clarity in his voice, instead echoed rough through the speakers. “They wanted to stop us. But we did not stop. We believed. We fought. We became gods. Now… Now they want to stop you. What will you do?”</p><p>“Kill!” One man screamed, such a long, loud, boisterous cry that it was quickly drowned out by a hundred others screaming the same.</p><p>The crowd collectively pushed to one side, towards the arch of pure stone opening the natural cave to the canyons beyond. They were all flailing arms and weapons, faces poisoned by hate, and chants of destruction. Already torches were flaring above them, before they could even make it to the open air.</p><p>Troy was left watching the chaos of the wave of bodies rushing through the small path. Watching, hearing, inhaling, tasting the chaos. With a long breath he let it ruminate, the shouting and screaming, the rage behind those voices, the building anarchy from that. He let it ruminate, and once the flavor had been digested, let the edges of his mouth split down the seam as a wide grin covered his face.</p><p>Intoxicated. That was what Tyreen would have called the expression if she had to name it.</p><p>But Troy wasn’t sticking around for Tyreen to diagnose him. He kept the giant chunk of metal he called a sword next to the stage in case of emergencies.</p><p>Now, he had retrieved the blade, hanging loose from his long mechanical arm. Drawn along by the pied piper of murderous chanting, he dropped from the stage, lumbering after the last few stragglers.</p><p>The night outside had a chill. Two large moons stretched up above a cloudless sky, lighting the craggy landscape in a blue haze. But outside the ground was broken with deep scars, canyons winding around, webbed together with patchwork bridges and platforms.</p><p>Even as the blue moonlight painted Troy’s exposed chest, a flare of red from the mesa above broke the natural palette of the night. The warm glow of fire spread, then a torch of light dropped down, for a brief moment highlighting the crimson carved into Troy’s arm. Then darkness once more as the flaming corpse from the torched house passed deeper down the crevice.</p><p>For just a moment, as the strangled noise of the body silenced on the ground far below, Troy wondered what he was doing here. Outside of their venue.</p><p>Everything was in place. His masterwork was complete. Now it was just a case of sitting back and letting the careful clockwork of his machinations run its course.</p><p>Or… Prove them all wrong. Show those naysayers he had recited in his speech earlier that he was a god.</p><p>He could even show Tyreen. She had doubted him long before. And while telling him that the power he sought would crush his body and corrupt his insides, she had sat on the power of a god. It wasn’t the power that she had doubted, it was his ability to harness it.</p><p>What a folly that was.</p><p>Troy emerged up the path to the mesa, blade dragging a long divot in the stone behind. This was the heart of their targets, house upon house of rags and sheet metal stacked, one upon the other. They lined the cliffs below, stood high upon the mesa, each leaned together in a precarious balance.</p><p>Now, flames licked through their doors. Screams of pain and horror echoed through dirty streets. A figure on a walkway high above clutched a bundled figure as they wandered, wailing.</p><p>One man made the mistake of running across Troy. Troy was at the edge of the stone, where far below their venue sat, the village stretched up around him on either side of the drop.</p><p>Whoever it was had been running for the bridge right beside Troy, only to drop back to the dirt. A thick splatter of blood sprung from the raised blade, arching across to coat metal and dust.</p><p>Those doubts had said the power would consume him until there was nothing left. If anything, Troy felt more alive than ever. His heart was pumping, his blood was pounding. He could see every fire and hear every scream. And every bit of it had come about because of him.</p><p>Now… now he could take part. He deserved it, he was hosting the party and there was no one to tell him he couldn’t join in. Couldn’t give in to the urge to join the fun.</p><p>What Troy forgot in those moments was that there was someone who could tell him no. She had just lost track of him, finding only a bisected corpse on the ground at the top of the steep path.</p><p>But she did find him, much later. And that was how Troy came to, confusedly blinking his eyes to try to right the spinning world.</p><p>Everything felt wrong. Specifically, his neck was having trouble maintaining his own head, instead wobbling in slow circles. His body felt like it had been rolled down a hill and then hit by a car, everything was sore and shaking with exertion. The world wouldn’t focus.</p><p>Perhaps most importantly, Troy couldn’t move. The air itself seemed to constrict him, his arms wouldn’t answer, neither would his legs.</p><p>Sudden fear burst through his mind. Every muscle seized at once, forcing them as hard as he could, his teeth gritting and eyes widening even with nothing clear.</p><p>“For the love of fuck, just relax,” she said.</p><p>Tyreen’s voice. He would recognize it anywhere, and like always it had an immediate effect, cutting through the fear and confusion that were wrapped suffocatingly around his head.</p><p>Troy blinked. Then blinked some more. And finally, his eyes focused and he saw her there, in front of him.</p><p>“Are you good?” She asked. She had caught that brief flicker of focus in his eyes, her own locked on him with a look somewhere on the intersection of concern, frustration, and exhaustion.</p><p>He was still just confused. So, he nodded slowly, then gave a grunt as the invisible grip on him loosened and his body folded to the ground in a pile of awkwardly angled limbs and painfully sharp robotics.</p><p>“Ow…” Troy grunted.</p><p>The fist of fear had loosened from him at Tyreen’s voice, more when he managed to pull one leg out from under him. Each limb twitched in place, fingers and toes clicking out a random pattern. Only then did he let out the breath he had been holding, feeling his body relax while his head settled.</p><p>Stuffy air followed back into his lungs, thick with an acrid taint. That spurred on the immediate memories, their event, the mob, the rampage that followed.</p><p>Even now, buildings were burning. The sound of toppling metal echoed over the crackle and roar of flames. The ones closest around them were black and hollowed, what walls left standing tilted at angles that didn’t seem safe.</p><p>And an inventory of the buildings around him led him to another discovery. Blood and bodies. The little street bend they were at, pushed up against an angle of buildings, was coated in blood. It pooled in places, smearing from there as if painted by a giant brush. Unmoving figures were strewn randomly about, some piled together, some just pieces, others laying beside or half-in the wreckage.</p><p>“You stupid piece of shit,” Tyreen said.</p><p>At the noise, Troy looked back at her. She was sitting down now, same as him, resting her palms in one of the sparse pieces of dry dirt around. Her chest heaved still, mouth open, eyes turned upwards as if tilting her head could get the oxygen in a little faster.</p><p>Quite the difference between her and Troy. The muscles of his limbs still ached dully, but his breath was event and there was still a reserve of energy hidden inside.</p><p>It was just his head. Foggy. Empty. Like the engine was still turning on and he had just taken the wheel.</p><p>“Did I get hit by a bus?” Troy asked.</p><p>Tyreen let loose a sigh of frustration and fell back. She stared up at the pillars of orange smoke trailing up into the stars.</p><p>“You tried to eat me,” Tyreen replied.</p><p>“I did not.”</p><p>“You did.”</p><p>“Did not.”</p><p>“One more word, and I’m going to chuck you into that fire,” Tyreen warned. “I found you slobbering all over the place, blood everywhere, just murdering everybody like it was going out of style. And then you tried to eat me!”</p><p>With a last shout of anger, she grabbed the nearest thing she could find and checked it at him, bouncing harmless off his raised arms. He watched the weapon roll to a stop just beside him, trying to remember the gap in his memories Tyreen was talking about.</p><p>She had thrown a shoe at him, foot still inside, white shock of bone sticking out from it. Vague familiarity of the carnage settled in him.</p><p>But Troy couldn’t believe he had turned on his sister.</p><p>He wouldn’t.</p>
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<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Two drowning people can’t save each other. All they can do is drag each other down.<br/>~Carsten Jensen</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“I am Tyreen Calypso.” Her chest heaved. She blinked clarity back into her eyes. More words followed, no apparent path, nor destination.</p><p>“I am a goddess. I am…” More blinking, more panting. One hand gingerly touched her chest, feeling it stretch beneath her fingers.</p><p>“I am the most powerful in the universe. I am Tyreen.”</p><p>Unfinished, the words carried on and looped. They passed in sync with the slow, heavy breaths. In, and out. In, and out.</p><p>Snapping her eyes open and closed once more managed to shake her back into the present. She settled into her own body, into her own existence, but felt the soft prayer uttered from her lips as if they were a stranger’s.</p><p>“I am Tyreen Calypso…” she whispered.</p><p>Tyreen Calypso was in a dark room. At her side, two braziers of stone held low fires against the floor, their glow doing little against the encroaching darkness. A ring of large stone pillars stood in front of here, in the centered a shadowed statue rising high above her head. The floor was tile or stone, what little she could see through the darkness held the vague shapes of church walls, with empty windows and missing walls against a night’s sky darker than she felt possible.</p><p>“I am Tyreen Calypso,” she repeated once again.</p><p>Repeating her mantra rooted her. The prayer kept her from slipping back out of her own consciousness, from becoming even more lost than she felt. The breathless whisper reminded her of who she was.</p><p>As her mouth moved, so did her feet. They kept close to the ground, edging forward inch by inch.</p><p>So to did the darkness move. Each press closer to the pillars, to the statue looking down at her with an empty face of black, shifted the veil of shadows tighter over her.</p><p>Tyreen was in a dark room. She had not entered this dark room, had never seen it before this moment. She didn’t know if she was on the same planet she had been on, or where that even was, or much of anything at all.</p><p>She just knew that she did not like this dark room. She did not want to be here.</p><p>Then came a hiss. At first, it brushed passed her ear as a gentle breeze. Before its end came a change, a mouth closing to slope air into a word as obscured as its source.</p><p>The direction of the whisper was easy to tell. Forward. To the statue and above, or beyond, or below. Some direction through darkness so viscous Tyreen had no intention of deluding herself to assume what was beyond it.</p><p>But she was there. The pillars rose up on every side, gating her approach to the statue. It loomed high above, marble carved to cloth, hands at its sides, palms pointed to her as she grew close. The darkness high above, clouding the face that overlooked Tyreen, was less imposing than that stretching just past her arm’s reach. The pyres could only flicker behind, touching the front of the statue and no further, her back coated by a shadow the sunk into void.</p><p>“I am Tyreen Calypso,” she whispered. The whisper grounded her, and recalling the last made her realize how fast her breath had gotten. Everything felt numb and cold, every inch of skin exposed to the dark drawing towards it, hairs on end.</p><p>“I am not afraid,” she said. She drew in power, breathed deep, summoning strength from her mind, body, from the distant memories of magic flowing down her arm.</p><p>“I am a goddess. I do not fear darkness!”</p><p>As every inch of her body had reacted to the dark, every inch was tapped to fight it. The numbness made her force muscle and sinew into action, fear and confusion meant doubling down on will and strength.</p><p>She shuffled, then stopped, then reached out a foot to step. Stepping forward brought her beside the statue, before the darkness. Just as she thought, it swam before her vision, something hidden, something disguised as the shadows itself.</p><p>A step of determination faced her into the darkness, and following close behind was her hand, bringing with it an expression crossed with force and will. Blue flared beneath her arm, burning bright across the tanned skin. Ethereal flame lapped across tracks of color, stretched out over her knuckles, dipped into her palm, and spouted up as she raised her arm to burn against the dark.</p><p>More darkness. That was what greeted her as she stood, one arm glowing above her like a torch. Only another arms span before her was lit, enough to see that nothing but stone tiles waited directly before her.</p><p>But it didn’t feel right. No, it felt like every single hair on her body was on end, all pointed here. Forward. She felt as if the darkness was waiting here for her.</p><p>She felt no more relaxed, knowing there was nothing waiting for her here. A sickness had settled into her, growing queasy as an expectation filled her, built on the feeling that it was waiting for her. Or it was coming for her. And she had no closer guess as to what it was. Only that it was there.</p><p>“I am Tyreen Calypso,” she said. No voice came out, but it reminded her. Of who she was. Of what she was doing. Of where she was.</p><p>Except, not. The last time she had whispered the words, she was standing between a statue whose face was a wicked black, grinning down on her with shadowed fangs. And across was a pillar, white stone, slowly being eaten away by a darkness settling towards her.</p><p>But her arm waved to the side, burning a bright blue to reveal just a few scant feet. Nothing. Darkness. An edge of tile below said the platform had been there, statue atop. And the pillar on her other side was gone as well. No ball of firelight greeted her, not turning left, or right, or all the way around.</p><p>Not even the silhouette of windows against the dark sky. Turning again, she couldn’t even guess which direction any of it had been.</p><p>“I am Tyreen Cal-”</p><p>She stopped mid-turn. Darkness, everywhere, except directly in front of her. Inches away, close enough to feel the cold rasp of his breath, skin white and gaunt, sunken over his cheekbones, eyes glossy white, tongue bloated purple.</p><p>The specter was easily taller than her, skin and bones reaching out from under tattered white robes. A long rasp of air came from him, something so close to words in a failed whisper, only to rise and rise until it was a screeching wail as he reached bony fingers towards her neck.</p><p>Inky black began to leak from the middle of his forehead. More and more of it each step he took closer to her, screaming and rasping as she backpeddled away from blind hands tipped by mottled talons. All the while, Tyreen could hear him saying child, but not a single thought had come to her head for what to do.</p><p>“I am Tyreen Calypso. I am Tyreen Calypso. I am Tyreen Calypso.”</p><p>Tyreen Calypso was sitting on the floor, blinking the clarity back in her eyes. Her chest was heaving, left hand resting against it to feel it rise and fall beneath her fingertips.</p><p>“I am a goddess. I am the… I am. I am Tyreen Calypso.”</p><p>Each whispered word settled the blood pumping rapid through her veins. Bit by bit she eased back into herself, until her chest had stopped burning, and the pumping of her heart in her ears had settled.</p><p>Only then did Tyreen pick herself off the floor, the floor she was sitting on that she could not recognize or place. Her location was only a part of the questions rising to her foggy mind. She had no concept of how long she had been here, where she had come from, or why she had come.</p><p>All she knew was what her eyes took in. A floor, metal, tinted a purple-ish blue. Or a blue-ish purple. Not solid, there were divots and seams, parts with warning strips, a section just behind her that settled down just a few centimeters. All of it was curved or slanted, flat horizontally, but rounded as a room towards a centered focal point.</p><p>The room itself was large. Big enough to fit a small fleet of cars side-by-side. But the size didn’t concern her.</p><p>One thing Tyreen did not like was that the walls were dark. Not a natural dark. The kind of dark that told her that something that should have been there was not, and nothing had replaced it. The kind of dark that she could look out with binoculars and have no indication if she was seeing inches or miles.</p><p>The second thing that concerned her was the center of the room. The focal point, where all the divots and seams in the metal tiles led.</p><p>There was a circle of coffins. Metal ones, but body shaped and body sized. They were surrounding a small circular platform, metal faces raised slightly to join their lifeless stares together above them.</p><p>“I am Tyreen Calypso,” she muttered. The whisper made her feel safe. She was reminding herself of her own power, that she could handle anything, spooky alien caskets included.</p><p>“I am a goddess,” she said. Strength had returned to her voice, too loud in the chamber that seemed to swallow each of her senses. It smelled of cold and metal, the only sound was her own, the only things she could see were laid before her, illuminated by a faint glow from nowhere. She could taste the faint copper of heartburn or bile, and a dryness from breathing low through her lips.</p><p>But Tyreen could only stand and stare. What she did feel, each sense, felt muddled, and yet every one of them was screaming, writhing inside of her, pulsing with anxiety and fear. All while she looked to the center of the room, to the ring of metal husks.</p><p>Nothing stirred. Tyreen’s eyes kept ensnared by the room’s center, unblinking and unphased. Another worry was beginning to rise, though she couldn’t say for certain she felt as if it were getting darker. The light came only from around the circle, casting its soft glow as far as it could reach, just to her feet. Beyond, it was as if standing within a planetarium, where the domed roof led to infinite space, only no stars could pierce the void.</p><p>The void was creeping behind her. It was a shiver up her spine, a fear clouding her lungs.</p><p>And then there was the unknown before her. The dread of something terrible tainted the very sight in her mind. Something terrible, something familiar, something she felt she should know but could not put her finger on.</p><p>Tyreen wanted to run, but there was nowhere to run. She wanted to fight, but there was nothing to fight.</p><p>She felt sick and wrong. Very, very wrong. Not limited to fear and anxiety, but a sense of wrongness so overwhelming it had filled her body.</p><p>How long she had stood there was a mystery. Her eyes had spent much of their time unblinking, unwilling to trust the shadows long enough to shut themselves. Each moment had seen her pulled more and more taut, the darkness winding the anxiety in her until it had begun to fray towards snapping.</p><p>Finally, she could take no more. “I am Tyreen Calypso. I am a godd-”</p><p>She stepped forward. The sole of her boot echoed.</p><p>Eyes wide, mouth open in horror, she watched. A deep, painful scream tore up through her chest, reaching her mouth, tainting air with despair.</p><p>“No!” She shouted. She felt herself shout, felt a twisting need to rush forward, to do something, anything.</p><p>Then her boot settled against the floor, and the crystal clear memory of every moment ripped from her eyes and left her exactly where she had been. One step closer to the center. Nearly petrified with fear.</p><p>Bile rushed up her esophagus. The discomfort had turned to real sickness for a moment, the moment it took her body to register that it was somehow doing two things at once, and slingshotting back into itself.</p><p>Queasiness, Tyreen could live with. But that moment, that was real. She had felt it, lived it, only to come out fully aware that it had not happened. She hadn’t screamed, Tyreen had stood still after taking the first step.</p><p>After a few seconds, she managed to swallow back the urge to vomit. All the while, Tyreen stared at the ground, wide-eyed, adamant against looking anywhere but directly at her feet.</p><p>But the room was filling with seeping darkness. It oozed from behind her, lapping slow at the back of her feet, an unnatural viscosity to the shadows now starting to flood their way towards the light.</p><p>Were it not for the dread she felt for the void creeping around her, Tyreen would have stayed right there. Fear told her it was getting closer, getting faster.</p><p>“I am Tyreen Calypso.”</p><p>Another step, reaching her foot out to close in on the lights defusing from the coffins. Her foot landed quiet.</p><p>Hard steel bit into her neck before she had event shifted her weight. It bit first, then tightened, lock clicking as gears ground together to pull tighter and tighter.</p><p>Tyreen gave a strangled scream. Her hand was outstretched, only to draw back to grasp futility at the thick collar of metal that had captured her.</p><p>For the first time, she wasn’t afraid for herself. One thought flashed bright through her mind, dominating all others.</p><p>She didn’t have time for this. He needed her.</p><p>That was the last thought. She was vaguely aware of pain. Had some knowledge that a surge of something had ripped through her body from her neck. Tyreen knew she was falling, dropping to her knees, but by then she was just so tired, and everything had gone so dark.</p><p>And then she was dropping to her knees, unable to hold her stomach, a surge of sickness splashing out from her lips.</p><p>Even as she held herself up with one arm, the other felt across her neck and came back bare. The feel of metal was there, smooth against her fingers, but as a ghost hooked into her mind.</p><p>Tyreen stood. She tried to. One foot came forward to hoist herself back to her feet. Her bracing hand left the floor, stomach dropping as her body raised. Ice flooded her veins.</p><p>Standing before her was a man, large even how he was slumped to his knees. The soft glow from behind held him gentle, leaving his features bathed in shadow. He was upright, balanced on his knees, head slumped forward and shoulders slumped down.</p><p>A beam of light glinted through the center of his chest. Not from his chest, but from behind, through a hole the size of her fist that was just level to her eyes.</p><p>“I am Tyreen,” she said, told him. Her body was shaking, resisting the pressure of the dread trying to crush her down.</p><p>“This isn’t real- you’re not him,” she said.</p><p>Staring forward at him, she felt once more her reality turned to smeared ink on a page. Her eyes were locked on him, on her present, and yet her face was turned and screaming agony as raw as her voice, and facing the other side she was choking through the blackening pain from her neck. All thrashing from her head at once, trying to rip her mind in two.</p><p>“Stop,” she growled from grit teeth. “Stop. Stop!”</p><p>She was clutching her head, trying to, while her vision warped from one hell to the next. The pain of her fingernails digging into the skin was nothing but distant pressure to the rest.</p><p>“Get out!” She screamed.</p><p>It was harder now to tell where she ended and the next began. She felt it trying to consume her, one mind overlaid upon another. The visions, the dread, the death, all as familiar as her own skin.</p><p>“I am a goddess! You’re not welcome here!” If not for the constant whisper of her own voice, she may have fallen for it. Even now the moment of her letting the agony rip into her felt so natural it could have been her own.</p><p>“I am Tyreen Calypso!”</p><p>Another step, then another. Three realities became five. She was helpless, fallen to the ground, feeling the world end. She was losing consciousness on the floor, struggling to take it back. She was screaming, still trapped in that moment of hell. She was frozen, watching the moment unfold, praying for a single chance to change it.</p><p>And somewhere, deep in the midst of it, she was forcing her feet forward, one after the other. Her teeth were grit, eyes wide, unseeing. Blood trailed down the sides of her face, dripped from her nose, smeared as her fingers trailed fresh lines into her skin.</p><p>Her arm was blazing. The floor was sinking to ink, save the space of her feet where tendrils of blue traced across her skin and arced away.</p><p>Each step felt harder than the last, visions growing more chaotic. Moments sprouted from nothing, stretching out of her like an unwanted limb, only to rip back inside, all of them fighting for dominance of every second. All at once, a cacophony of screaming, of sights and sounds, drowning out the distant feeling of her own voice trying to hold herself together.</p><p>But she saw him. Through the mess. Looking through a pile of pictures, and there was the one she was trying to find peeking out from the bottom.</p><p>A trail of blue light was reaching from her, slowly edging up his form. She saw the dark uniform he wore, blood staining the front black. Saw shapes, his shirt clinging to the muscles across his side, a broad chest, strong shoulders, each burned into her mind, hung carefully with her other prized memories.</p><p>A hundred voices had calmed, waiting with baited breath. The raucous roar of untold realities screaming in her face had quieted, leaving the sharp imprint of sound in a head too full to focus.</p><p>The light of her power had reached his face. Wide chin, flat nose, sharp cheekbones, all pale as if the color had drained with the blood from his chest.</p><p>“I am Tyreen Calypso,” she whispered. But she felt the pain. Pain for a man she didn’t know, didn’t recognize, despite being so utterly convinced that she loved him.</p><p>The hurt she felt sparked a thought. It hadn’t torn into her anew, but had settled into an old wound barely closed, settled in so tight that the new felt as an echo of the old.</p><p>“Troy.” She felt the name come out in a breath, the end of a path she had traced through obscured memories, looking for the mirror of this loss.</p><p>Now that she had said it, the name stood out amongst all of her memories. Tyreen could barely split her own self from the people borrowing her body to live. The point her skin ended and the next began was blurred, as were her own thoughts, her own feelings.</p><p>What she could find of herself was in the shadow of the echoes. Her skin felt numb to the cold, while theirs burned bright in pain. She was worn by the weight on her, by fear, shock, and being torn apart, while their pain was raw and visceral. Even their memories felt more real, the fractured images evoked by the face before her, crisp against her mind’s eye. Her own felt hollowed, consumed by the same blackness pooling around her feet.</p><p>But the darkness couldn’t take Troy from her.. She couldn’t lose him, not again.</p><p>Even if losing Troy was the same feeling feeding back from the faces that continued to blur and stretch from her. The man before her was dead, and every other reality in her body was mourning, collectively forcing on her the feeling of a broken heart ripped fresh. And all Tyreen could do was watch.</p><p>As she watched, the man shifted. He lowered, dropping just inches before settling once more, and then dropping more, slowly beginning to sink down to her height.</p><p>Her eyes turned, noticing only then that the blackness had filled the room. Ink had flooded from the walls to the center, where only the coffins and their small platform were safe.</p><p>It lapped at his knees, shadow so dark the light cast from her arm held no sway on it. Each moment it pulled him more, tugging him deeper and deeper, past the knees, to his hips.</p><p>The visions had coalesced into one action, overlapped ad infinitum over her mind. Mourning overpowered the screaming and pain, joining chaos into a choking sob, echoed painfully across her heart.</p><p>To her, it was a scattered deck of cards slipped perfectly into place. Down to just two wholes in one head, and one was looping through an endless cycle of tears ground down to white noise. But the clarity felt little better to Tyreen, just sinking back into a body where every hair was on end and every muscle pumping with ice.</p><p>Tyreen wasn’t sure where she had returned to. Her memories outside of the last few moments were dull headaches with an occasional image or two thrown in. Metal beneath her feet, shadows cast on the wall, but little concrete.</p><p>Her first impression was of an expanse, where the floor was a dark liquid and there was nothing but empty night devoid of a single star. But there was light, an aura giving a soft glow from the tops of four metal containers lying just past her. And that glow only reached so far, slowly pressing down, removing the mask of an expanse, replaced instead with a wall of black slowly closing in around her.</p><p>She could remember the corpse, now just a lump of darkness covering a head and shoulders. She could remember the fading double-image of another existence borrowing hers, the pain it felt. The pain it caused her.</p><p>Most of all she could remember the shadow of her brother. The memory felt fresher than her own. That memory reminded her of the power flowing through her veins, brought into light from her arm. The source of that power. The history.</p><p>“I don’t know what you think you are,” Tyreen said. She was looking down at her clenched fist, through a glow brighter now than it had ever been. “But I’m not going to let you fuck with my head like this.”</p><p>She looked up. Everything oozed of evil, of black pooling around her feet, encroaching from behind, above, and in front. Her body was screaming fear at everything, every bit of the unnatural shadow that was eeking towards her.</p><p>Except she was not at its center. The diffused light barely reached her, and a look to the side showed that its glow cut off just past her. The same distance as it was across from the objects in the center of the room, or above.</p><p>Her heart was threatening to beat out of her chest. Her lungs wanted to stop and seize at any moment. Her limbs shook violently, even as she stood still. But she was facing the center, refusing to back down.</p><p>“I am Tyreen Calypso,” she warned. “I am a god!”</p><p>A surge of light flared from her arm, arcing and twisting out from her spot in the darkness to the center. It carried the weight of Tyreen’s emotions, flaring with anger, shaking with her desperation, yet still thundering with raw power.</p><p>But the bolt stopped mid-air, crashing into nothing and splintering out in a shower of sparks right between the circle. Light built up as it was dammed in the air, still flowing in from Tyreen’s hand, exertion twisting her face.</p><p>There, a crack of black and red split thin air in two. More split into place, shooting out in jagged lines like the spiderweb of a wounded mirror. Then more, and more, each a thin line that pulsed an angry red and dimmed to black, staring back at her as the flare from her hand retreated.</p><p>Tyreen stared. Anticipation had sucked the air from around her, brought a cold shiver down her spine, and settled inside her.</p><p>She wanted to say that she feared no one, but Tyreen couldn’t help but feel fear here. In the instant the shattered air had finished, her stomach roiled, her head fogged like a week of no sleep, and she felt an unnatural chill beneath the etchings of her arm.</p><p>What it was, she didn’t know. That thing that had been lurking behind the dark all this time. The thing looming over her, stalking her. But it was here, and it terrified and relieved her.</p><p>“About fucking time,” she said. Willing her hands to stop shaking, she balled both into fists. Her teeth ground together, wide snarl showing them, and the endless depths of her anger, to the web in front of her.</p><p>Before Tyreen’s eyes, air burned a fiery red, folding away like burning paper. The phenomena was limited to a very specific location, roughly as tall and wide as a human body. As it burnt, it peeled and faded back into darkness.</p><p>What remained was a dull outline of burgundy on black, surrounding a body that absorbed light and color. The body was small and skinny, no larger than a child. Smaller than herself, but equally imposing. More so, it had a presence that made the room churn to a stop.</p><p>Tyreen was aware of how eerily still everything was. The black had stopped pressing in on her aura of light. The figure stood, stoic, where it had entered.</p><p>There were others as well, unmoving in the corners of her eyes. Bodies, standing still in the darkness, barely lit by the ambient glow from in front. Tyreen hadn’t noticed them appear, but she could see them now, even sparing just a quick glance away from the thing in front of her, she could count dozens of them.</p><p>The thing in front had no skin, no body to speak of. It was darkness, an aura of evil, and a presence that twisted Tyreen’s stomach in rolls. The others had something. A texture, barely visible in the dark, not important enough for her to take her eyes off her target in front.</p><p>“I get it,” Tyreen said. She made a vague motion out, to the darkness, to the bodies waiting just out of reach. To the last remnant of the corpse sunken beneath the dark. “The lives I’ve taken, right? Their memories- their own little hells? Going to just press play in my head and let them handle me?”</p><p>It made sense to her, that assumption. That corpse had been as real and raw as this very moment to her, as had all of those other moments that she had never experienced herself. But someone must have, and the only logical conclusion to her was locked deep beneath the angry glow of her arm.</p><p>Her heart was thumping wildly as she stepped closer. Another surge brought more light to her arm, tingling under skin, ready to lash out at any moment</p>
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